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To what extent have the Russian-language media shaped their community's vote on May 17? (May 11) - Immigrants from the former Soviet Union have, twice in Israel's recent history, been instrumental in deciding the outcome of national elections. A population to be reckoned with, they are certain to have an impact on May 17 as well. Their power is seen in the care the larger parties have taken to include Russian subtitles in their TV ads, but how the immigrants will vote may be best seen in the Russian-language press coverage of the campaign. Issues that have long found expression continue to be voiced as election day nears, particularly the feeling that the immigrants have been unable to penetrate the inner circles of Israeli society and intellectual life. In a Vesti op-ed piece by Leonid Rotstein, Israel's intellectual circles are described as left-wing and are accused of greeting the Russian immigrant intelligentsia with "unprecedented arrogance and scorn." On the other hand, the right wing, according to Rotstein, "stands up for the Jewish nature of the state, and loves and values Jewish history and traditions." The country's problems, he goes on to say, are not the fault of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, but the legacy left him by the government of Shimon Peres. A parallel opinion piece by Georg Mordel in Vremya claimed that the Israeli Left is "against privatization and opposed to private initiative. "The Russian media is not overwhelmingly right-wing," noted Tamar Horowitz, a professor of educational sociology at Ben-Gurion University who studied the influence of the Russian press on the 1996 elections, "but there is certainly a right-wing bias, in much the same way that there is a left-wing bias in the Hebrew press." Surprisingly, the accusations made by former Immigrant Liaison Bureau (Nativ) chief Ya'acov Kedmi of Netanyahu's indifference to immigration from the countries of the FSU received little coverage in the Russian press, as did his recommendation that immigrants vote Ehud Barak and Yisrael Ba'aliya. According to reports in the Hebrew-language media, Yisrael Ba'aliya leaders believed that the scant coverage Vesti afforded Kedmi's resignation was due to the newspaper's clear preference for Yisrael Beiteinu. But less partisan explanations also exist. Many of today's immigrants are unfamiliar with the crucial role Nativ played in rekindling Jewish identity in the USSR and have never even heard of Kedmi, who as Yasha Kazakov was one of the first Soviet Jews to fight for the Jewish right to repatriate to Israel in the late 1960s. IMMIGRANTS from the Soviet Union, even before the last great wave of newcomers, generally tended to vote right of center. They were opposed both to territorial concessions and to the Labor Party, whose socialist platform and May Day parades in the 1970s reminded them of the Soviet regime they despised. Yet, after the influx of immigrants in the early Nineties, the newcomers' votes were instrumental in ousting the Likud and Yitzhak Shamir in 1992. Voting on bread-and-butter is sues of housing and employment, they overwhelmingly supported the Labor Party and Yitzhak Rabin. Four years later, they expressed their anger at the Labor-led government, accusing them of failing to address their specific needs. Frustrated and feeling culturally and socially outcast, the immigrants, led by Natan Sharansky, created Yisrael Ba'aliya. The new party promised that it would devote itself to the immigrants' needs and ensure that absorption became a national priority. It won seven seats in the Knesset and two in Netanyahu's cabinet. Indeed, research after the 1996 elections showed that some 65 percent of the immigrants voted for Netanyahu, a level of support that was instrumental in bringing him to power. HOWEVER, Dr. Eli Leshem of the Hebrew University's School of Social Work warns against seeing the immigrants as a bloc. "Only 40 percent of them voted for Sharansky in 1996, and while tribal voting will continue to play a role in this election, most of the immigrant votes will split along similar lines to those of veteran Israelis, though with a greater tendency to support the Right." Leshem further warns against interpreting the immigrants' right-wing bias in Israeli terms. "Their political sympathies are guided by the values they brought with them. Russia was an imperialist country, and they grew up with the security safety belt that this provided. They superimpose this on Israeli reality." And the issues that led 40 percent of the immigrants to vote Yisrael Ba'aliya three years ago still remain primary concerns. The political parties have realized this, and are playing on it in their ads in the Russian-language press. The exceptions are the Likud ads which claim that "Only Netanyahu brought security" and "Only Netanyahu can bring genuine peace"; and those of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party that tell the voters: "You don't get peace by retreating." The rest of the advertisements overwhelmingly address issues of housing, mortgages and the economy, as well as issues of personal status and control of the Interior Ministry, which Yisrael Ba'aliya has placed at the top of its agenda. "If your mortgage is growing, your salary shrinking and the two major parties are buying their coalition partners at your expense, you need a new path," says the ad for the Center Party. "The Center Party guarantees... that within a year of our coming to power you will see a growth in the economy of 5 percent, 100,000 new jobs, a significant reduction in the level of taxation and the beginning of large-scale construction of residential accommodation." The degree to which the advertisements differ from those in the Hebrew and English-language press is striking. The texts are longer and more detailed, the promises more specific. ARTICLES discussing election issues also tend to be lengthy. Not surprisingly, both Sharansky and Lieberman receive considerable coverage through interviews and op-ed articles bearing their names. More surprisingly, perhaps, the two parties are not always presented as being in competition with each other for the immigrant votes, or at least do not base their agenda on the same issues. Sharansky's columns mainly focus on the importance of securing the Interior Ministry for Yisrael Ba'aliya. "In order to defend the interests of immigrants," he writes in Vesti, "Yisrael Ba'aliya is demanding the Interior Ministry, which is, to a very large extent, responsible for the discrimination against the new immigrants and for the violation of our civil rights and freedom." The issue is also addressed by Lieberman, who writes that it was he who first raised the importance of solving the immigrants' bureaucratic problems. "Sharansky and Edelstein sat in the government for three years, did not say anything about the Interior Ministry, and suddenly remembered its existence three weeks before the elections." Yet the main thrust of Lieberman's campaign is based on security issues and the question of territorial compromise. WHAT remains unclear is the impact that the endless opinion pieces will have. Some analysts argue that precisely because many of the immigrants are dependent on the Russian-language press for coverage and explanation of the issues facing the country, they are susceptible to influence from partisan editors and opinion writers. Moreover, immigrants have little prior experience with a free press and may therefore have difficulty in differentiating between fact and opinion, which are freely mixed on the pages of the Russian-language newspapers. On the other hand, according to a recent survey, about 78 percent of the immigrants say they watch three Moscow-based networks on cable television, and 35 percent say that these channels are their primary news source. This figure rises to 45 percent among immigrants who have been in Israel for less than four years, and suggests that the impact of Israel's Russian-language media is limited. Moreover, people in the Soviet Union were used to the "doublespeak" of Pravda and Izvestiya and knew how to read between the lines. Still, Horowitz maintains that the Russian press played "an overwhelming role" in the 1996 elections. "It was Vesti that defined Netanyahu's success in the 1996 elections. The voice of the Labor Party was absent from the pages of the Russian newspapers. Had there been a Labor equivalent to Vesti, the results would have been very different." This time, however, she believes that the effect will be attenuated by the immigrants' greater knowledge of Hebrew. In light of the importance of the Russian-language media, the recent trips Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu made to Moscow take on significance outside of, and perhaps above, any attempts to improve ties between Israel and Russia. The importance was not lost on the Israeli media. And yet the Russian-language press was not critical of what was seen by many non-Russians as a cynical manipulation of an official foreign visit. This may have seemed less obvious to the new immigrants, many of whom were clearly delighted to see the leaders of their new country warmly received in their former home, to which they feel culturally close and with which they are eager to maintain ties. This feeling of nostalgia for the FSU may stem from the immigrants' fundamental feeling of disappointment and frustration at their reception in Israel and the problems many still encounter finding work. The feeling of alienation finds an extreme example in an article by Maya Kaganskaya, one of Vesti's leading columnists. "We have lost hope not only in tomorrow, but also in yesterday," she writes. "Netanyahu is the worst leader that the Jewish people have ever known," but it is better to vote for him than the alternative, she adds. "If the nation again places its belief in Netanyahu, both will have no option other than to find courage, determination and patience. Let Netanyahu and the Right win again. "It is not an ironclad guarantee, but it is still the basis for some hope that the country and freedom might be saved. In the opposing scenario we may have to look again for both of these." The writer is a former spokesperson of the Zionist Forum.
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